https://i.imgur.com/KXQIunc.jpg
<sup>[Part 1](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pressure-3-beautiful-corpse-part-1)</sup>
<sup>[Part 2](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pressure-3-beautiful-corpse-part-2)</sup>
<sup>[Part 3](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pressure-3-beautiful-corpse-part-3)</sup>

 “Don’t run away! I don’t mean you any harm. I’m dreaming, like you! I just want to talk to you, I’ve never encountered another person in my dreams before.” Rounding the bookcase she was startled to see the girl standing her ground. She wore a beautiful frilly but faded green dress. The bottom rim and sleeves were lined with lace that looked to be falling to bits, there were holes here and there and while still very lovely the garment was clearly worn out to the point of needing repairs. This led her to then examine the girl’s face more closely.

She was beautiful, with perfectly symmetrical features, a small nose and chin, and large dark almond shaped eyes. It could have just been the absence of bangs but her forehead seemed very slightly larger than normal. Sunken eye sockets and bony cheeks suggested emaciation. Could she even eat in this dream, Olivia wondered. 

“You aren’t dreaming”. The girl’s voice was quiet and raspy, on the verge of faltering. She sounded as weak and haggard as she looked. Olivia raised an eyebrow. “Come again? Yes I am. We both are. I got here by falling asleep in my office. Look, if you try to read any book it just-”

The girl became frustrated and interrupted. “You know damn well this isn’t a normal dream. It’s too real. The rooms stay the same shape and size. You can navigate this space in a logical way. Everything stays where you left it. How do you not know this? You knew how to use the orbs.”

Olivia recalled passing through the bizarre little glass sphere by focusing on the narrow view of the destination in its center. “I saw you do it. Honestly, I figured out how they worked by accident. I’d be worried about how to get back if I didn’t know that I’ll just wake up from this soon.”   

Now came the second shock. “You won’t. Not while you’re in my headspace. You can get back from the industrial building because you’re connected to it but otherwise you have to get back to your own to wake up. I think it was that depressing school with all the broken lights? Bad memories from your youth, I take it.”

It was uncomfortably on the nose. Memories of being bullied early in her education still troubled her decades later. She found herself avoiding parties, dating, anything that would require more than very limited social interaction. The only way she could really connect with someone was administering therapy. It was, after all, how she’d begun to care for James. 

“It’s nothing I care to talk about until I know more about you”. The girl shrunk away from her a little. Her body language hinted that she could bolt at any moment. “You’ll know what I choose to tell you. How did you enter my headspace? You’re a fabricant, aren’t you?”

That word provoked a flashback to the abbatoir, and the grotesque, hobbling little artisan. “I only know of one fabricant. The one that “perfected” me. If I understand what it is correctly, the rest of it still sleeps in the trench.” The girl winced at the word “perfected”. “No, that was a fabricant too. A puppet made from living tissue, like you. It uses that particular one as hands, eyes and ears. And as a tool to put together more monsters like you.”

Monsters? She reflected on how someone discovering for the first time what made her different from the rest of the women aboard the Belusarius might react. She’d been eased into this existence by progressively more bizarre events over several weeks. By now it was normal for her, or at least what she accepted as her new reality. But for someone as oblivious to the true strangeness of the world as she’d been before she took that transpo sub to the Tartarus, to be confronted with all of it at once would be mind breaking. 

“I don’t understand how you got in here. Or why you’re not preaching. None of the others could get in. What’s different about you?” One question after the next. She had some of her own. “Not so fast. How do you know about fabricants? How did you learn of the one that sleeps in the trench?”

The two were soon seated on opposite sides of a great mahogany table. On the far end was some sort of elaborate eighteenth century chemistry set. Similar sets were strewn seemingly at random around what otherwise looked like a turn of the century private library in the home of an affluent family. 

“Outside of all this, I’m in a coma. At least I assume so. If I were dead, I don’t think I’d be here. Sometimes I can faintly hear sounds from the waking world. The voice of doctors comforting my mother. The beeping of the respiration machine. Best I can tell, I’m in a hospital bed. Can’t be too many of those in the Belusarius. You could probably find me if you tried.”

Olivia recalled passing a medical center with Vivian the night before. “And do what? Should I tell them that I met you in a dream? They’d put me in a padded cell.” The two smiled, and the tension between them seemed to diminish. 

“At first it was the usual dreams. But over time they became more concrete and logical. Closer and closer to the consistency of the waking world. Some of them were very cruel, made me believed I’d woken up and reunited with my mom. I know better than to fall for that now.”

Olivia asked if she’d experienced waking dreams, like the ones she and Hank encountered on the Tartarus. “Yes! Only when I first came to the Belusarius. I wondered if it was just me, guess not. We both know what’s doing it. It intrudes somehow, sends fake people like you to find me.” Olivia looked hurt. 

“Well no, that isn’t fair. Not like you. They’re puppets the way you are, animated by umbilicals leading back to that thing that mutilated you. But they seem intoxicated. In some kind of trance. You can still talk to them and have limited conversation as if they’re the same people they were before. But almost like their thought processes are being forcibly steered towards it, they begin preaching. Talking about the warmth and love of the master’s embrace, how we’re all meant to enter into a loving relationship with it and be remade in its image. They all speak in the same stilted syntax, like when they get that way they are no longer communicating consciously but speaking from the hindbrain. This is the first time I’ve met one that seems completely sane.”

All of it was intensely familiar. Olivia thought back to the lanky balding man she’d run into on her way to Vivian’s room. He’d been cogent at first but the more they talked the more he seemed to enter a trance...repeating the same terms, his sentences flowing in a distinct, alien way like some kind of perverse poetry. She explained how she’d been abducted in the darkened tunnels, vivisected, then reassembled and released because James exchanged himself and the two others for her. 

“I get it. You were a special case. The ones it releases keep their volition. Three for one, same deal every time. My dad’s in there, you know.” The image was growing more clear. Something like a pyramid scheme. 

“It gets its hands on someone you care about, then offers to exchange them for three people you don’t. But if you go through with it, the people who cared about the strangers you traded to it go looking for them and wind up in the same situation. To free the one they love, they have to become “perfected”, then abduct three people of their own choosing to trade.”

It dawned on Olivia that this constituted a geometric increase in victims, both fabricants and the ones trapped in the Foundry, forever locked in intimate dream-like congress with the thing in the trench. The more people it consumed, the more came looking for them and were suckered into the same desperate arrangement. Three strangers for the one you love. How many might, even now, be in her situation aboard the Belusarius? She only knew of herself, the balding man and Vivian.

“What if you perfect someone?” The girl furrowed her brow. “Why would you do that, knowing what you’re getting them into? You know well enough the hell you’re in, I can’t imagine luring someone else into it if I were like you.” Guilt, dormant in her since she’d given Vivian over for perfecting in the abbatoir, now bubbled to the surface. “Special case, like mine. She wanted it. Even knowing what it was like for me. She just wanted to live forever.”

The girl looked repulsed. “How could you let her do it? Knowing what it meant? Now she’s like you. She’ll have to harvest innocent people just to keep her body from falling apart. Who would agree to that?” Olivia tried and failed to find the words to explain it. Vivian was a strange person. The idea that she was now choosing who to ‘borrow’ skin, bone or other tissue from was also a strange thought. How quickly such a vile act was becoming normal to her. Had her brain been altered after all? No...no such easy absolution. 

“She wanted it, badly. I didn’t see any reason to refuse. I guess I didn’t fully think through what it would mean. But she’s like me, fully cogent. I haven’t noticed any difference, she certainly doesn’t speak like the other one I saw. I think it spares you that level of control, if you give yourself up willingly. Or if someone strikes a deal for you. It’s bizarre, isn’t it? There’s a structure to all of this, rules I’ve been gradually picking up on.”

The girl narrowed her eyes. “All of it calculated to achieve the same result. An ever growing number of innocent people trapped within it, for whatever demented satisfaction it gets out of holding them there. It has its own headspace, you know. Yours is the school. Mine is the library we’re in now. That thing has its own headspace, more vivid than either of ours. It’s some kind of industrial building.”

Olivia’s eyes widened. “The foundry!” She must’ve known it by some other name because she showed no signs of recognition. “I dunno, maybe. Everything there was colorless, dry and dead. The machines were abstract and functionless. The only light from the windows and few working bulbs was wrong somehow, like a false light. Deep yellow, dark in a strange way, like it is not so distant from shadow. An imitation, maybe modified darkness. I felt soiled by it whenever it shone on me.”

The foundry. It had to be. “That’s where James is! And your father.” She nodded. “While listening to the faint sounds from the waking world I heard my mother talking with my doctor about my father’s disappearance. He’d been having strange dreams for several weeks before it happened. She was concerned he’d lost his mind and was hiding in the disused lower floors. I tried to cry out to her but my real body’s mouth won’t move. I don’t understand it. I’ve been in my own headspace for what feels like years, probing the other dreamers connected to it. But I just can’t wake up. Something prevents it. Maybe you can help?”

Olivia felt as a stranger in a strange land. This was the first time she’d managed to venture beyond her own dreams, and only by accident. If this girl, who’d become skilled at it over the weeks, months or years spent in a coma couldn’t do anything about her condition, how could a novice?

“I’ll try. If I can find my way back to the school, I should be able to wake up. I know where the medical center is, I can ask about you. What’s your name?” The girl hesitated, then meekly answered. “V...Violet. Now you!” 

Olivia smiled, said that Violet was a pretty name, then answered in kind. “You’re the first one I’ve met that I feel safe talking to, Olivia. It’s exciting. For the first time in ages it feels like there’s a chance I might escape all of this. But there’s something I have to do before I leave.”

“Find your father”. She nodded. “I know I can get to his cage in that desolate place from here. I don’t think there’s any way to access it when I’m awake. Knowing what I know now, I can’t leave him where he is. Even if it’s the happiest he’s ever been. It isn’t real. It’s the projected fantasy world of something foul beyond description that exceeds any horror I imagined before I knew of it. If I could wake up now, if it meant leaving him here, I’d turn down the chance. Either he comes with me, or I’m staying too.”

It resonated with Olivia as she felt the same about James. But she knew too well that it could reach her in a waking state just as easily. The creature itself, in a flesh and blood sense, existed out there in the sea. Not just in this dream world. If by some method it could be permanently destroyed, she would have to do it from the Belusarius. 

“I’ll return when I know more.” Olivia took Violet’s hand. It was ice cold, but she looked appreciative. “It was nice to have company. I have to admit, I’ve been lonely. If you find me in the medical center I want to know about it, but remember what I told you. I can’t leave this place without Dad.”

Olivia promised she wouldn’t wake her prematurely, and the two parted ways. Stepping through the glass orb, she returned to the small sandy island, located the orb which led to her primary school dream that she now understood to be her own mind, and passed through it. 

Standing quietly in the darkened hallway lined with empty lockers, she reflected on what she’d learned. None of it offered any alternative to trading innocent lives to the creature in exchange for James. And now she knew that she was far from the only one aboard the Belusarius looking to bargain with the devil. Tears began to form. Before they could fall, the school faded around her. 

She woke up in her office, and took several minutes to scrutinize it in order to ensure that she really was awake. One of the lessons she’d taken away from the dream was that it is pure fantasy to believe that things are at all as they appear to be. The more she discovered, the stranger her reality grew, and it was only getting worse the closer she looked. 

The corridor from her office emptied out into one of the atriums. Each cylindrical tower was divided into twenty one circular floors, with the middle floors of every tower devoted to shared public space. Fountains, a small garden with a few saplings, that sort of thing, all for the psychological benefit of the crew. 

The design aesthetic was the same everywhere. That was one of the major departures from city living. Aside from being at the bottom of the ocean, obviously. Minor variations existed from one atrium to the next but they all had the same contoured seating designed right into the rim of the fountain and along the outer wall, never intended to be moved, added to or otherwise modified. 

Something bothered her about all of it that was difficult to pin down. The closest approximation she could come up with was irritation at the team of engineers responsible for thinking that they could account for every possible need of the occupants, like they were designing an ant farm or a zoo exhibit. The idea that the human animal is possible to understand and provide for so completely was repulsive to Olivia as a mental health professional who knew better. 

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<sup>Stay Tuned for Part 5!</sup>